I’m working on a thing! It’s a Captain Forever thing! The Dawn Star was unwell, with the renderer failing on many machines, the design disappearing into the wilderness, and a secret new Blue Manchu project dominating my schedule. I decided to scale my CF ambitions down to something I could finish, and now it’s done! Almost. It’s 90% done, and I’m working hard on the other 90%. The new project is Captain Forever Trilogy, a re-release of the first three games (Forever, Successor, and Impostor) in glorious full screen, high framerate, GPU accelerated glory. The flash software renderer behind the original games is too slow to run fullscreen, which is why the GFX have been redone in this mode. They looks a little different, but I still like ’em.

Tonight I’m working on the ?????????? part which unlocks after you complete the three games, then it’s on to options menus, polish, packaging, and release. Woo!

Speaking of release… I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. These days a downloadable game is either Minecraft, on Steam, or dead in the water. So I’ll aim for Steam. But even then, I can’t just leave the supporter program running and give out steam keys to all new supporters. If you do that people buy copies with stolen credit cards, sell the keys on G2A or similar, and leave it up to the real card holder to reverse the transaction. I’d not only lose a sale, but I could end up paying a fee for credit card chargebacks. Multiply this by a few thousand and you can see why it’s not my preferred option. This is why we can’t have nice things. It’s also why my options are limited to:

1) Try to release Trilogy on Steam, but only give supporters access to a non-Steam download.
2) Try to release Trilogy on Steam, give existing supporters steam download codes, and rework the supporter system so new supporters pay less but don’t get Trilogy.
2a) The same as 2), but shut down new purchases into the supporter system. Of which there are now very few.